The Future is Now.

James Voorhies

The Future is Now.

James Voorhies

Cultural connement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

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Question: To what extent do you believe an exhibition can be the most suitable forum for passing on to the public the impulses which you hope to attain?

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Dear Harald Szeemann:

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More and more, exhibitions are ceasing to be exhibitions of artworks and exhibiting themselves as an artwork instead.

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Dear Harald Szeemann: Who the hell are you calling a whore?

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Szeemann established the curator as author or auteur and the exhibition as his work.

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The Parisian site neatly illustrated the tension between narratives of historical progress embodied in the construction of the Centre Pompidou and the destruction of historical site that is a prerequisite for progress.

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This is a movement from expressionist art to an art of implementation.

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There they developed their work as curation, a heady mix of pointed even polemical political art mixed with popular and folk culture in clean, strongly styled exhibitions.

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It was a November day in 1985, and having just seen a spectacular gallery made from a converted factory building, he was driving by large numbers of other factories. Suddenly, he said, he thought of the huge abandoned factories in his own neighborhood of North Adams.

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In his proposal he had explicitly explained that the caravan, which was positioned in a dierent location each week, was meant as a metaphor for a city undergoing change.

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It seemed important, therefore, to take the opportunity to challenge the paradigm of art production and distribution that Dia in its earlier incarnation had presupposed and which still clings to its exhibition practices, in step with most of the art world.

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The curators direction with the use of space is neither so arbitrary nor so conveniently thematic as it is appropriate to art today, since the issues of identity and culture that these sites raise are addressed by artist in their work.

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Parting from the traditions of object making, these artists have adopted a performative, processbased approach. They are context providers rather than content providers.

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In spite of the great international interest, it was closed a month ahead of the planned schedulenancial problems of the city was announced as the ocial reason.

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Widespread opposition to the museum in its planning stages seems to have given way to an acceptance of its positive eect on the image of the city and its contribution to urban regeneration.

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The artist explored the eects of the building on the surrounding neighborhood as well as its everyday life.

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The installation oered visitors a place of calm and rest, the opportunity to relax on a bench in the midst of greenery.

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The artist integrated more or less purposely assisted by agitation and instrumentationa heterogeneous art public into an artistic form of expression.

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Biennials dont work, so why start another?

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Sputniks will be contributing to the shape and character of the Kunstverein with their questions, critiques, advice and ideas over the next three years.

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The artist proposed a work that would entail the moving of a piece of land by ten centimeters with an act of mass participation.

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The work was the result of a sixmonth stay in Caracas, where we researched the informal city under the auspices of the Caracas Case Project.

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A series of publicly accessible bicycles designed according to the desires of a group of friends from the former capital region.

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People gathered to collect bottles made out of the plastic type PET.

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The tensions between these two dierent social and cultural circles reinvigorate the work, but somehow at its own expense: themes get lost in logistics, and the political stance of the artist always verges on the patronizing.

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Responding to this exhibitions title and tenor, the artist collective, which mostly addresses social problems, decided to combine both a social and an ecological approach within its project.

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The Ninth Havana Biennial intended to draw attention to the culture which is produced in urban territories and their suburbs.

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In just three days, inhabitants of Stuttgart were interviewed about their own city.

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unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. I realize that this sounds somewhat paradoxical, yet its the only way to describe the project that was intended to start as a biennial (Manifesta 6).

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Performers play the role of passers-by, and passers-by become performers.

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I went to the site quite a few times, trying to imagine this future High Palace of Culture.

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My involvement in the critical space is a legacy of what happened when a semi-autonomous critical voice started to become weak, and one of the reasons that happened was that curating became a dynamic process.

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Curators and curatorial practice are now as visible as artists themselves.

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It is the specics of a location that are used here as the initial reference point for intervention.

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The artists idea to take the rundown lavatories as the starting point of his artistic work can be understood as a service to the public, one that seeks to relieve the necessary use of a toilet of its unpleasant sour note and turn it into a normal thing to do.

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These interventions manifest themselves as forms of direct action targeting specic decits within the political, social and cultural economy.

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I am very interested in the gardens as they are such an integral part of the towns life and I would like to start a project that would look at gardens in detail and document the changes they undergo.

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Public art was billed as a subtle way of reclaiming and humanizing the urban environment, immediately becoming symbol of the economic and cultural renaissance of our cities.

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The projects aim not only at aesthetic images, but also to improve the social functionality of the city.

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Of course artists have heavily inuenced curators, not only through the work that they make when they curate but, more often, simply through their own artwork. Look at how much inuence the practice of institutional critique and conceptual art have had on curators over the last forty years.

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In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need an artist as a traditional producer. Rather, today the artist is more often hired for a certain period of time as a worker to realize this or that institutional project.

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Rancires writings on the modern aesthetic regime of art have become almost suspiciously popular in the art world; Rancires statement that Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity seems to generate a pleasant vagueness. 85. 86.

They see Manifesta as a tool in their own cultural marketing, and they attempt to outbid the competition with higher and higher starting budgets.

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He brought in a team to rebrand the city.

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This art is autonomous because it creates its own institutional and economic space apart from existing institutions.

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The group appears to be establishing an autonomous institutional support system from the bottom up.

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The content of the work is procured from original research and interviews with individuals who worked in the Sprague Electric Company, now the site of MASS MoCA.

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Indicatory of an exhibition venturing to pin down, stretch and animate the experience of time in standstill, motion and reverse the Reader parallels the multiple layers of presentation and expressions characterizing the exhibition.

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In 2015 art is almost completely instrumentalized in the economic sense, regardless of whether nancing is private or public. Art then services either national or European interests that wish to construct a certain identity: it is a desirable marketable commercial good for private ownership and it contributes to regional development and provides society with 100. new creative employment opportunities.

In 1972 the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann made the exhibition Questioning RealityImage Worlds Today for Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. It was a groundbreaking exhibition that elevated the role of the curator to a vital, creative producer and by extension lent more agency to the art institution. It was a pivotal moment when the curator acquired a greater level of input in the way artists produced work and how it was installed, rearticulating the form of the public exhibition.

This book is a brief narrative that deploys the 100-day framework of Documenta to trace an evolution of the instrumentalization of art by way of the exhibition, from Szeemanns Documenta 5, Martha Roslers If you lived here and sculpture project Mnster to Manifesta, Bilbao and the Frieze Art Fair. The Future is Now includes glimpses of alternatives, such as Anton Vidokles e-ux, to the exhibition as the only outlet for dissemination of an artists work.

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Robert Smithson, 1972, quoted in Gabriele Mackert At Home in Contradictions. Harald Szeemanns Documenta in archive in motion. 50 Years of Documenta 19552005 (Gttingen: Steidl, 2005), 258. Robert Smithson, Cultural Connement, 1972; statement was published originally in the Documenta 5 catalogue as Smithsons contribution to the exhibition. Joseph Beuys, Oce for Direct Democracy through Referenda at Documenta, 1972 Joseph Beuys and Dirk Schwarze, Report on a Days Proceedings at the Bureau for Direct Democracy, 1972 in Participation. Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2006), 122. Robert Morris, Letter to Harald Szeemann, 1972 reproduced in Individual Methodology, ed. Florence Derieux (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007), 144.

10. Lucy Lippard, July 3, 1972, letter by Lucy Lippard to Harald Szeemann 11. Last night of Documenta 5, 1972, Harald Szeemann giving interviews Gabriele Mackert At Home in Contradictions. Harald Szeemanns Documenta in archive in motion. 50 Years of Documenta 19552005 (Gttingen: Steidl, 2005), 253. Pamela Lee, Object to be Destroyed. The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2000), 171. Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975 Artists Placement Group, Kunst als Soziale Strategie, 1977 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces. Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 62. Alan W. Moore, Artists Collectives Mostly in New York in Collectivism After Modernism. The Art of Social Imagination, eds. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007), 204. Group Material, The Peoples Choice (Arroz con Mango), 1981 MASS MoCA, North Adam, Massachusetts, founded 1999

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17. 7. Daniel Buren, works for When Attitudes Become Form, 1969, Kunsthalle Bern Daniel Buren in 1972, quoted in Gabriele Mackert At Home in Contradictions. Harald Szeemanns Documenta in archive in motion. 50 Years of Documenta 19552005 (Gttingen: Steidl, 2005), 259. Lucy Lippard, July 3, 1972, letter by Lucy Lippard to Harald Szeemann, reprinted in Harald Szeemann. With by through because towards despite. Catalogue of Exhibitions 19752005, eds. Tobia Bezzala and Roman Kurzmeyer (Zurich: Voldemeer, 2007), 365.

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20. Rosalind Krauss, The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum in October (Vol. 54, Autumn, 1990, 7. 21. Kasper Knig, quoted in The Snowman. Interview

with Kasper Knig, in Art as Public Issue, OPEN Cahier on Art and the Public Domain (Amsterdam: SKOR/NAi, Vol. 7, No. 14, 2008), 86. 22. Michael Asher, Installation Mnster (Caravan), 1987 23. Martha Rosler, If you lived here, 1989 24. Martha Rosler, Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint in If you lived here. The City in art, theory and social activism, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1991), 40. 25. Mary Jane Jacob, Places with a Past, (originally 1991) in Situation. Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Doherty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2009), 199. 26. Michael Brenson, Visual Arts Join Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in New York Times Arts, May 27, 1991. 27. WochenKlausur, Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women, Shedhalle, Zurich, 1994 28. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces. Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California 2004), 1. 29. Johannesburg Biennale, Universes in universe (http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/africus/ english.htm) 30. Second Johannesburg Biennale, 1997 31. Frank Gehry, The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 1997

Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 268. 34. Apolonija uteric, Juice Bar, 1998 35. Tobias Rehberger, Within View of Seeing (Perspectives and the Prouv), 1998 36. The Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 267. 37. Susanne Altmann, The Disruptive Factor, in City Index. Research in Urban Space (Dresden: Kunsthaus, 2000), 132-133. 38. Jozef Legrand, Dresden-Demo, 2000 39. Pubic protest action Demolish Neoliberalism, Multiculturalist Art-system by Russian artists Aleksanr Brener and Barbara Schurz at opening of Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, June 2000. 40. Camiel van Winkel, The Rhetorics of Manifesta in The Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 219. 41. Kunstverein Mnchen, Sputniks: Whichever Way the Journey Goes, 2002 (http://www.kunstvereinmuenchen.de/01_programm_programme/ sputniks/00_en_sputniks_idea.pdf).

42. Carey Young, Everything Youve Heard Is Wrong, 1999 43. Francis Als, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002 44. Andrea Phillips, The Politics of Informal Production in Informal Architectures. Space and Contemporary Culture, ed. Anthony Kiendl

32. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights. The Writings of Andrea Fraser (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 249. 33. The Manifesta Archive in The Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and

(London: Black Dog, 2008), 145. 45. Marjetica Potr, Temporary Territories in Informal Architectures. Space and Contemporary Culture, ed. Anthony Kiendl (London: Black Dog, 2008), 161. 46. Marjetica Potr, Dry Toilet, 2003 47. Patrick Tuttofuoco, BMX-Y, 2004 48. The Manifesta Archive in The Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 322. 49. Learning Site, [Collecting Systems]: [Learning Book #001] (Chicago: WhiteWalls, 2005), 36. 50. Learning Site, [Collected Material Dwelling #002], 2004 51. Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002

58. Salla Rautianien, Seven People of Stuttgart and swabian clichs, 2006 59. unitednationsplaza, Berlin, 2006-07 60. Anton Vidokle, Exhibition as School as Work of Art in Art Lies (no. 59, Fall 2008), 70. 61. Clemens von Wedemeyer in sculpture projects mnster 07 (Cologne: Walter Knig, 2007), 265.

62. Clemens von Wedemeyer, [From the Opposite Side], Metropolis Cinema, Berliner Platz 39, 2007 63. Luca Frei, The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg. An interpretation, 2007 64. Luca Frei, The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg. An interpretation (London: Book Works and Utrecht: Casco, Oce for Art, Design and Theory, 2007), 14. 65. Liam Gillick quoted in Mick Wilson, Curatorial Moments and Discursive Turns in Curating Subjects, ed. Paul ONeill (London: Open Editions, 2007), 207. 66. Liam Gillick, BIG CONFERENCE CENTER LIMITATION SCREEN, 1998, in What If: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design, 2000 67. Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, Annandaleon-Hudson, New York 68. J.J. Charlesworth, Curating Doubt, in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, eds. Judith Rugg and Michle Sedgwick (Chicago: Intellect Books, University of Chicago, 2007), 91. 69. Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack. Documenta 12

52. Pablo Lafuente, Thomas Hirschhorn in Frieze (April 2005). 53. Stephanie Snyder, Beyond Green. Toward a Sustainable Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Smart Museum, 2005), 141. 54. WochenKlausur, Intervention to Upcycle Waste and Museum Byproducts, 2005 55. Tercerunquinto, Public Lighting, 2006 56. Ibis Hernandez Abascal, Public Lighting in Tercerunquinto. Institutional Empowerment (Los Reyes Coyoacn: Ediciones Corunda, 2008), 17. 57. Katrin Strbel, City Spectacle (Stuttgart: Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2006), 74.

catalogue (Cologne: TASCHEN, 2007), 264. 70. Jorge Mario Juregui, Pedestrian path in Salguerio, 2007 71. Hans-Peter Feldmann, WC Facilities on the Domplatz, 2007

82. Jens Homann, Passengers, 2008 83. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Palazzo delle Esposizioni bookstore, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009 84. Boris Groys, Marx after Duchamp or The Artists Two Bodies in Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010, 127. 85. Sven Ltticken, Once More on Publicness. A Postscript to Secret Publicity in Fillip (No. 12, Fall 2010), 91. 86. Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2000 87. Manifesta 8 Brunch, June 2010 88. Hedwig Fijen, How a European Biennial of Contemporary Art Began in The Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 196. 89. Finn-Olaf Jones, A Bilbao on Siberias Edge? in The New York Times Travel, July 22, 2011. 90. Dubossarsky Vinogradov, Underwater, 2011

72. Peter Reech Hans-Peter Feldmann in sculpture projects mnster 07 (Cologne: Walter Knig, 2007), 89. 73. Onkwui Enwezor, The Production of Social Space as Artwork in Collectivism After Modernism. The Art of Social Imagination, eds. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007), 241. 74. Le Groupe Amos, Campagn la dmocratie, ca. 2002 75. Jeremy Deller, Speak to the earth and it will tell you, 2007 76. Jeremy Deller, sculpture projects mnster 07 (Cologne: Walter Knig, 2007), 68. 77. Paloma Blanco, Use, Abuse and Disuse of Public Space Islands+Ghettos (Heidelberger: Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2008), 46. 78. Installation view Islands+Ghettos, Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2008 79. Urban Think Tank, Urban Connectors, 2008 80. Islands+Ghettos (Heidelberger: Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2008), 134. 81. Jens Homann, Art as Curating Curating as Art in Art Lies (no. 59, Fall 2008), 34.

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Anton Vidokle, e-ux, July 29, 2011

92. Boris Groys, An Autonomous Artist in Anton Vidokle. Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat (New York: Sternberg, 2009), 73. 93. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter. Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (New York: Pluto, 2011), 100. 94. Temporary Services, 2011 95. Bureau for Open Culture, On Symptoms of Cultural

Industry, 2011 96. Bureau for Open Culture, On Symptoms of Cultural Industry, 2011 (www.bureauforopenculture.org) 97. Imagine Being Here Now. 6th Momentum Biennial, 2011 (http://www.momentum.no/about.189486. en.html) 98. Theodor Ringborg, To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Told by an idiot, signifying nothing, 2011 99. Frieze Art Fair. Main Sponsor Deutsche Bank 100. Maria Lind, European Cultural Policies 2015. A Report with Scenarios on the Future of Public Funding for Contemporary Art in Europe in European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, August 2005. (http://eipcp.net/policies/2015/lind/ en).